Abstract
The constitution of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ by the performative power of the hyperreal is a familiar topos of today’s Postmodern fiction and, equally, of Poststructuralist theory. Graham Swift’s photoreporter in Out of This World foreshadows Jean Baudrillard’s pronouncements on the Second Gulf War of 1991, discussed below: ‘it goes without saying that a task force of cameras should accompany the task force to the Falklands. As if without them it could not take place… As if the camera no longer recorded but conferred reality’.1 In the Postmodern condition, the media do not only inform our perception of events ideologically; for much of the time, reality cannot happen outside their validating gaze. However, writers were already tangling with this paradox in the thirties. The venal journos of Auden and Isherwood’s play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935)2 anticipate Swift’s and Baudrillard’s point, and it is arguable that thirties media awareness was itself an early symptom of cultural transition to Postmodernity. Indeed, in the purely chronological, if not theoretically-laden, sense, thirties writers were the first Postmodern generation. Their sense of reality was in crisis under the full impact of early twentieth-century technologies, as well as awesome stirrings in geopolitics heralding the globalisation of economic power (postwar corporate multinationalism itself being foreshadowed by the worldwide success of Hollywood). I intend to show that the so-called ‘anti-modernism’ of the thirties can indeed be read as a transitional phase between Modernism and Postmodernism. As we shall see, the epistemological doubts raised by Modernist art, and at first apparently refuted by thirties writers, were subsequently intensified by their own encounter with media technology and international Realpolitik.
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Introduction: Obituaries of History and the Thirties Sublime
Graham Swift, Out of This World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 189.
See Chapter 2 below, ‘Press’.
See Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Reality Gulf’ The Guardian (11 January 1991) and ‘La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas en lieu’, Liberation (29 March 1991).
Also Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992), especially pp. 11–31 and 192–6.
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. M. Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 145–7.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), p. 45.
Also Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review (1985), repr. in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), p. 387.
Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989; repr. Picador, 1990), pp. 245–6.
See Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1994), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. II, p. 294. Henceforth all page references to Orwell’s Collected Essays will be given in brackets in the text.
See Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in his Selected Writings, pp. 166–84.
Also Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 39–40.
See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), especially Chapter 1.
See Chapter 6, ‘Forms’, of Raymond Williams, Culture (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981), pp. 148–80.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 6.
Jameson, ibid., p. 18.
Also Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle trans. from the French (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), section 34.
See, respectively, Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 219–53
Orwell, Collected Essays, Vol. IV, pp. 312–13
Stephen Spender, ‘Guernica’, New Statesman (15 October 1938), p. 568.
F. T. Marinetti, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 96–7.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 252.
Benjamin, ibid., p. 234. Also Brecht on Theatre ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 135.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 253, note. Donald Albrecht, by tracing the use of the new architecture on screen in the twenties and thirties, shows the alternative method by which Western commercial cinema absorbed Modernist aesthetics, to dilute their philosophical complexity and condition a conservative ‘mass’ response. In its most positive projections, Modernist design tended to be used for superficial optimism, the faintest visual echo of the Utopian social agenda of movements like the Bauhaus. When featured in the form of ‘Art Deco’, Modernism was transformed into a chic ‘streamlined’ symbol of wealth and privilege, as in many Hollywood musicals. On the negative side, it was associated with dehumanising urbanism, as, most famously, in the Futurist city of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926).
See Donald Albrecht, Designing Dreams (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).
Jameson’s phrase in Postmodernism, p. 25.
Cecil Day Lewis, Revolution in Writing (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1935), p. 9.
Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 279.
Stephen Spender, ‘Poetry and Revolution’ in Michael Roberts (ed.), New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf/Hogarth, 1933), pp. 62–71, especially p. 64.
(Also repr. in Spender’s The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933–75) (Macmillan, 1978), pp. 48–53, p. 48.)
Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 47.
Ibid., pp. 37–8.
Cf. Eagleton, ‘The Marxist Sublime’ in his The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and Norris, Uncritical Theory, Chapter 4.
Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (1938: repr. London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 121–2.
Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, ed. and with a foreword by Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 138–54, especially p. 147. The Aleph becomes a device for mapping the Postmodern universe of computer data or ‘cyberspace’ in William Gibson’s novel Mona Lisa Overdrive (London: Gollancz, 1986) and for the new cartographics in
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical and Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), Preface and Chapters 8 and 9.
See Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 50 and 66.
The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), p. 46. Henceforth all page references to English Auden will be given in brackets in the text.
See ‘Francois Mauriac’ (1945), Graham Greene, Collected Essays (London: Bodley Head, 1969), pp. 115–21.
Also ‘The Explorers’ (1952), p. 316.
Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 2.
Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 2. Also ‘The Poet in England Today: A Reassessment’ (1940), p. 114.
See the opening section of ‘Memorial for the City’ for Auden’s postwar recantation in his Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1976), p. 450.
See Cunningham, British Writers, pp. 78–9. ‘In the Cage’ is in Vol. X of The Complete Henry James (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1964), pp. 15–138. It is also significant that the discarded title for The Waste Land’s ‘A Game of Chess’ section was taken from James’s story and cf. MacNeice’s reference to Auden’s ‘poem-telegrams’ in a 1931 review (Selected Literary Criticism, p. 1).
Graham Greene, It’s A Battlefield, p. 7. Henceforth all page references to It’s A Battlefield will be given in brackets in the text.
Rex Warner, The Wild Goose Chase (London: Boris Wood, 1937), pp. 224–5. Henceforth, page references to The Wild Goose Chase will be given in brackets in the text.
See ‘Panopticism’ in A Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 206–13.
Cunningham, British Writers, p. 10.
Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 47–8.
Also Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, pp. 253–64.
Lance Sieveking, The Stuff of Radio (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 63.
Cecil Day Lewis, Revolution in Writing, p. 15.
Graham Greene, ‘Wings Over Wardour Street’, Spectator (24 January 1936), repr. in Mornings in the Dark, p. 487. (Henceforth all page references to Mornings in the Dark will be given in brackets in the text.)
Also Day Lewis, Revolution in Writing, p. 15.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 48.
Foreword to Readers’ Union edition of Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London: Lovat Dickson, 1938), pp. v–vi.
See F. R. Leavis, Mass-Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930).
Cunningham, British Writers, p. 296.
Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930 Spanish; English trans. London: Allen and Unwin, 1932), p. 59.
Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930 Spanish; English trans. London: Allen and Unwin, 1932), p. 59. Also Charles Madge, ‘Press, Radio and Social Consciousness’, in Cecil Day Lewis (ed.), The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution (London: Frederick Muller, 1937), p. 154.
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London: Heinemann, 1934: repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 375. Henceforth all page references to English Journey will be given in brackets in the text.
Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, Cinema, Literature and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 82.
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932: repr. Penguin, 1979), p. 78.
Quoted in Bernard Waites et al. (eds), Popular Culture: Past and Present: A Reader (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 163.
See Philip M. Taylor, ‘Propaganda in International Politics 1919–1939’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda in World War Two (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 9.
Winifred Holtby, South Riding (London: Collins, 1936), p. 18. Henceforth all page references to South Riding will be given in brackets in the text.
Claude Cockburn The Devil’s Decade (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973), p. 103.
Also Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. I, 1922–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990–), pp. 298–9.
Stephen Tallents, ‘Fleet Street and Portland Place’, quoted in Asa Briggs, A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. II, The Golden Age of Wireless (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 160.
See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), pp. 14–19.
W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier (London: Faber, 1958), p. 153.
World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (1951: repr. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), pp. 190–1.
Also Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955), p. 109. Henceforth all page references to Collected Poems will be given in brackets in the text.
Cunningham, British Writers, p. 281.
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Williams, K. (1996). Introduction: Obituaries of History and the Thirties Sublime. In: British Writers and the Media, 1930–45. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24578-9_1
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